Entre banzeiros e remansos: memórias da professora Ionete da Silveira Gama

Abstract

Memory is humans’ ability to preserve meaningful things that happened in the past. By making us remember events, it allows us to tread again important pathways of collective and individual human trajectories. In this dissertation, our objective is to recollect fragments of the memories of a teacher, Ionete da Silveira Gama, in order to understand how her life experiences influenced her music, and how did it relate to primary school contents she taught in riverside cities in the countryside of the state of Pará. Her memories as a teacher make us understand how important it is to use work methodologies which include the sociocultural experiences of students to teach contents from different school subjects, from an interdisciplinary standpoint. We ask ourselves how does Ionete Gama’s music blend Amazonian cultural elements with the natural sciences in an interdisciplinary perspective, and how can it be connected to the themes taught in Primary School? To reach this goal, we recorded fragments of her life’s story through interviews, so as to understand her trajectory, emphasizing the reminiscences of her childhood by the Amazonian riverside and of the years she dedicated to teaching river dwellers. These interviews were written down and became an (auto)biographical narrative that is complimented by her images and documents. In this dissertation, we give pride of place to six songs that refer to environmental aspects that are integral to the Amazonian culture and, based on them, we elaborated illustrated stories for children. The stories are aimed at the primary school level of education.